The Good of Poker

I had a quite unintended interaction on Twitter last week that ended up having a great outcome - not only for me personally, but for one other person I'll likely never meet, and for a worthy charity.

It all started when I happened to notice a re-tweet by Ike Haxton, a pro I follow.  Apparently, an EPT Live viewer had won a deck of EPT cards signed by Haxton, and decided to auction them off via Twitter with the proceeds going to Lung Cancer Canada.  I checked out the auctioner's profile, and saw the bid sole bid at the time was $25.

Sure, why not, I'll play.  I bid $30, expecting to be quickly outdone.  It took a while, but there was another bid, for $31.  Since it was going to charity, I decided to play along.  At this point, the tweets themselves tell the story best:













After that, there wasn't a lot of action, though I kept expecting to get outbid at any time.  It wasn't until much later that evening that the a resolution was reached:



At the end of the day, I was able to start my 2014 charity giving, some kid in Britain got a sweet deck of cards that he apparently really wanted, and $166 was raised for a good cause.  I also gained another Twitter follower when Fleming_clan followed me shortly after his last tweet.  Not sure who it is, but the list of people that follows him includes a bunch of Vegas blogs, a couple casinos, and Scotty Nguyen himself.

So, it was a good day as it stands, but it may be even bigger in the grand scheme.  When I decided to write about this experience, I debated as to whether it should go here on my poker blog, or on my personal blog.  I decided to place it here because this is, to me, what I want my involvement with poker to be like.  Playing the game, I've realized, is almost tangential to what I really want to achieve.  I want to get my name out there, but more than that, I want to be know as someone who is not only respectful to the game and it's players, but uses whatever skills he has to help other people.

How exactly I can do that, I'm still working out.  I already committed, starting last year, to tithe 10% of all casino winnings, above and beyond my normal tithing.  I have the thought of taking an additional 10% and giving it to a poker-related charity, perhaps Poker Gives. That is something I am going to research a bit more in the coming days and weeks.

Either way, I am committed to figuring it out.  I want my $35 to Lung Cancer Canada to be only the top molecule of the tip of the iceberg.